Pathology diagnostic investigation of patient material (e.g. tissue and cells) is the basis of many treatment decisions, e.g. in oncology. In standard anatomical pathology, diagnosis is made on the basis of cell morphology and staining characteristics. The investigation of the pathogenesis and progression of diseases, such as cancer, may require the use of multiple biomarkers for staining. The validation of these biomarkers using the standard histopathological techniques may be time-consuming and labor intensive.
In recent years, tissue microarray has been proposed to overcome these problems. Tissue microarrays are paraffin blocks produced by extracting tissue cores from different paraffin donor blocks and re-embedding these into a single recipient (or microarray) block as an array. Therefore, a tissue microarray may allow high throughput analysis of multiple specimens at the same time. For example, US 2009/0247416 A1 describes a method for analysis of tissue microarrays. However, analyzing images of tissue microarrays may be difficult e.g. with multiple tissue cores and/or multiple stains. WO2015063192 relates to a method of registration of two images of whole tissue slices. An unreliable area in the first image is determined and the registration is performed based on an area in the first image outside the unreliable area.